Cry Baby

by Mark Billingham

  Fifteen minutes after leaving Seacole House they’d crossed the motorway, and once they were past Cheshunt – a few minutes and a couple of golf courses later – they were speeding through open countryside.

  A bruise of sky rising ahead of them.

  Grey fields falling away on one side of the road and the spindly fingers of treetops reaching across the high hedge-line on the other.

  Kimmel leaned back in her seat. She said, ‘There’ll be plenty of time for that later, you know.’

  Thorne did not take his eyes off the road. The needle nudging seventy, the lights on full beam. He grunted a ‘What?’

  ‘Beating the shit out of yourself.’

  SEVENTY

  Angie was there within ten minutes of Cat’s call. They sat and drank the beers Thorne had taken from the fridge earlier, while Cat fought to stay calm and told Angie what had happened.

  ‘Jesus,’ Angie said. ‘So . . .’

  ‘So, Josh must have put the picture of his dad in the folder when he was in Kieron’s room.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘He must have done, right?’ Cat was still shaking. ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

  ‘Why, though?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . to tell us?’

  ‘So, why not just fucking tell us?’

  Cat shook her head. ‘He’s been acting really weird, Maria said. Maybe he’s scared of his dad or scared he’ll get in trouble and this was just his way of letting us know. Like leaving a clue, or something.’

  Angie swigged and swallowed. ‘You reckon his dad . . . ? You know, with him?’

  ‘I really don’t want to think about it.’

  ‘Sorry, babe. Course not.’

  Cat stood up quickly and walked to the window. She leaned her forehead against the glass, the noise in her head not quite able to block out the curses Angie was spitting from the sofa behind her.

  ‘That beast is going to get what he deserves, don’t you worry about that. Everything that’s coming to him. They’ll cut his balls off, wherever he ends up.’

  ‘I know where they’ve gone, Ange.’ Cat turned round. ‘I know where he lives.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Thorne was out in the hall and I heard it come through on his radio, the postcode and all that.’

  ‘Where?’

  Cat told her. Said, ‘I’ve got no bloody idea how far that is.’

  ‘It’s up past Hatfield.’ Angie nodded. ‘I’ve got a supplier lives in that neck of the woods. It’s not a million miles away.’

  ‘What if he’s there, Ange? What if Kieron’s there and he’s crying for me?’

  ‘I’ll drive you.’

  ‘I mean, they told me to sit here and wait, but I’ll go mental—’

  Angie was already on her feet. She zipped up her jacket and downed what was left of her beer. ‘I’ve got a map in the boot.’

  SEVENTY-ONE

  Following instructions from Kimmel, Thorne turned off the A10 and on to the London Road, which wound north towards Haileybury. There was no street lighting, but the road was smooth and wide enough and, as it began to grow darker by the minute, Thorne could see other vehicles coming from far enough away to maintain a decent speed, even into corners. There were fields stretching as far as the eye could see on either side, the tall chimney of a crematorium, clumps of dense woodland in the distance.

  Kimmel kept her finger on the map. ‘Coming off in a minute,’ she said.

  They passed several turnings towards what looked like large private houses or country hotels and signs to smaller villages Thorne had never heard of.

  Woollensbrook, Spitalbrook, Yewlands.

  Just past a war memorial that appeared to have been built in the middle of nowhere, Kimmel pointed, said, ‘Here,’ and Thorne turned on to a road that was far narrower and anything but smooth.

  He slowed down.

  There were one or two widely spaced houses or small farms, but within a thousand yards there was nothing. The rutted road twisted for another mile or so, dipping then swinging left suddenly, until it became a track barely wide enough for a tractor. Thorne had little choice but to slow still further, eyes fixed straight ahead, save for an instant when his headlights picked out the eyes of something hiding low in the bushes, and the moment a few minutes later, when Kimmel pointed ahead and to the right.

  To a pair of lighted windows in the distance.

  ‘There . . .’

  Thorne hit the brakes and looked. He turned off his headlights then began to ease the car forward again.

  ‘Plan of action?’ Kimmel said.

  ‘Not got one.’ Thorne leaned forward, peering through the windscreen into the gathering gloom as the car crept along the track. ‘You?’

  Kimmel shrugged. Ten minutes earlier, they had received a message from Control that all necessary units were being dispatched from Hertford. There had been no word since.

  She said, ‘Suck it and see, then.’

  They stopped and got out of the car when they were still a hundred yards or so from the property. Stood and watched the place for a minute or two. It was certainly bigger than Thorne had been prepared for, not quite the quaint, picture-book ‘cottage’ the address had led him to expect. There were lighted windows on the ground floor as well as the first, a gate to one side, and what looked like a wooden garage attached.

  A dark-coloured Volvo was parked in front of it.

  ‘I hate the fucking countryside,’ Kimmel whispered. She was smiling, trying to sound jokey, but Thorne could hear the nerves in her voice.

  It was a relief.

  Thorne could taste his own fear, metal in his mouth. He could feel it churning in his stomach as he walked to the back of the Mondeo and opened the boot. He had no idea what he was looking for, what might be necessary, but he leaned in and quickly gathered up everything that looked remotely useful.

  Torch, crowbar, handcuffs.

  ‘That should cover it,’ Kimmel said. ‘Oh, hello.’ She reached down for the telescopic baton lying next to the spare wheel and tucked it into the back of her jeans. ‘You sure you don’t want to wait for . . . ?’

  Thorne was already moving.

  They walked quietly towards the house and, on a signal, Kimmel went through the side gate towards the rear. Thorne moved to the front door, gave Kimmel half a minute to get into position, then knocked.

  Waited, knocked again.

  He stepped to one side, leaned close to one of the windows and stared through a gap in the curtains into what he guessed was the living room. He could see details of what looked like comfortable, modern furnishings, the edges of well-stacked bookshelves and a top-of-the-range stereo system. He saw just enough of a wood-burning stove to see it was still glowing behind its blackened glass.

  Thorne moved towards the window on the other side of the front door, stopping for a moment to look again through its leaded pane. He gasped and stepped back, startled as a figure appeared in the entrance hall and loomed towards the glass.

  His fist tightened momentarily around the crowbar, then he relaxed and let the breath out, relieved to see that it was Kimmel.

  She waved and opened the door.

  ‘Back door was open.’ She nodded upstairs. ‘Looks like there’s nobody here, so I’ll have a poke around.’

  Thorne told her to be careful, then stepped back outside and walked over to the garage. The door was padlocked, so he put the crowbar to good use, and after ten or fifteen seconds of heaving he opened the door and stepped inside. A small car took up almost all the available space. He could just make out a light switch next to a stepladder thick with cobwebs and stepped across to flick it on.

  Stared at the red Ford Fiesta.

  Just as he was about to turn away, Thorne noticed an odd line just above the sill below the passenger door. He crouched down and ran his finger along the wavy trickle of blue paint.

  The original paint.

  He remembered what Felix Barratt had said. Shin
y . . . the car had looked shiny. A nice fresh respray would do that, Thorne thought, even one that was less than thorough, and would certainly explain why this car hadn’t shown up on any of the lists from the DVLC.

  Thorne left the garage, followed the path that led round to the rear of the property and all but bumped into Kimmel as she emerged from the back door. There was a pond and a small seating area – benches, a barbecue, a slatted table – that, given rather more light than this, would have provided the owner with a spectacular view of the woodland at the bottom of his garden.

  ‘Well, we’re in the right place,’ Kimmel said.

  ‘I know.’ Thorne told her about the car.

  Kimmel nodded back inside. ‘There’s a cellar.’

  Thorne waited.

  ‘A chain.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Toys and stuff, food, drawing equipment. I reckon that’s where Josh must have done his picture.’ Her voice dropped a little. ‘There’s cameras down there, too.’

  ‘Christ . . .’

  They turned and stared towards the woods, at the well-trodden track that snaked into the trees and disappeared. Thorne looked at his watch, up at the sky. ‘About fifteen minutes until it’s dark. Really dark.’

  ‘If that,’ Kimmel said.

  ‘His car’s here and all the lights are on.’ Thorne had the crowbar in one hand, his torch in the other. He flicked it on. ‘Fire’s still warm.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And the back door’s been left open.’

  ‘Yeah, but this is the countryside, isn’t it?’ Kimmel was bouncing on the heels of her training shoes. ‘It’s nice and safe round here.’

  ‘He hasn’t gone far,’ Thorne said.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  He did not usually take him into the woods this late, because there was far less to see, of course, and because the boy was afraid of the dark. So this particular outing killed two birds with one stone. Gave the boy the fresh air and exercise they both needed, but also punished him, just a little, for the disastrous weekend they’d all had to suffer when Josh had been here.

  The hysterics, the drama. The spoiling everything.

  Josh, too, had been afraid of the dark once upon a time, but Ashton had quickly taken steps to put a stop to that. Whenever Josh was with him, at any rate. It was all well and good to be afraid of something that might actually hurt you, but to be scared for no good reason was ridiculous, on top of which, irrational fears like that did more harm than good. Made a child weak and emotionally stunted. Left him unable to cope. His own father had taught him that very early on and, all in all, Ashton believed that the lesson – one of very many he’d been taught – had stood him in good stead.

  ‘Please . . .’

  The boy was doing his best not to sniffle. It was a start, Ashton supposed, it was something. A smile was probably a little too much to hope for just yet, the boy’s hand reaching out for him, but he would have both those things, one day.

  ‘Please can we go back now?’

  ‘We’ll go back soon. It’s only been fifteen minutes.’

  ‘I heard a noise in the bushes.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Like a . . . scritch-scratch.’

  ‘Just an animal,’ Ashton said. ‘There are animals out here, you know that.’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘Now, come here.’ They were sitting next to one another on the same fallen tree they usually ended up at. Ashton had told the boy he could climb up and walk along the trunk if he wanted to, that it would be fun when he couldn’t see very much, but the boy hadn’t been brave enough. Ashton patted a patch of moss-covered bark. ‘Come on, I’ll scooch over a bit.’

  The boy did as he was told and inched himself a little closer to Ashton.

  Ashton put his arm around the boy’s shoulders, tried to control his irritation when he felt the boy stiffen.

  ‘See, it’s not so bad, is it?’ He waited for the boy to shake his head. ‘I might do chips for you when we get back, how’s that sound? You need to start eating again.’

  The boy nodded. He had stopped sniffling.

  ‘That’s better. Isn’t everything so much nicer when you try to be good and do what you’re told?’

  The boy swung his legs, a little less tense. ‘Yeah . . .’

  Ashton tightened his grip. ‘Yeah, of course it is. The way it should have been at the weekend when Josh was here. You were supposed to be playing.’

  ‘He didn’t want to,’ the boy said.

  Ashton shook his head. ‘You’re here precisely so he’s got someone to play with when he comes. That’s the whole point. You’d have thought he would have been happy about that and said “thank you very much” instead of belly-aching.’

  ‘I wanted to play,’ the boy said. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘I know, but the truth is, I’ve really got no idea what to do, now. I thought, I hoped the two of us could just carry on as we were and that, every two weeks, you and Joshy would have a treat and get to play together. That we’d all be happy. Stupid of me, probably, but that’s what happens when you try to do something nice, isn’t it? You get let down. I mean . . . you weren’t supposed to have that chain around your leg, and Josh . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Well, I thought Josh knew better than that. I thought I’d taught him how to be grateful and make the best of things, but clearly his mother has been doing exactly what I told her not to and letting him get away with murder. Spoiling him.’

  ‘I’m not spoiled,’ the boy said.

  ‘So . . . we’ll just have to see, won’t we? I only hope that next time things go a little better, that you can both behave and make an effort to enjoy yourselves.’ He nodded, held up his hands. ‘I can guess what you’re thinking. How can there be a next time? Now that Josh has been here, surely he’ll rush back and tell someone and you’ll be whisked back to your mum and won’t all that be lovely? Well, Josh might be spoiled, but I know he’ll do as he’s told when it comes to telling tales. To not telling them. Yes, I’d prefer it if he loved me a bit more and wasn’t scared of me quite as much as he is . . . but I can live with it.’ Ashton stopped and stared at the boy. ‘Look, I know there are things you miss and everything’s still a bit strange for you . . . but this isn’t terrible, is it?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ the boy said.

  ‘I’m not terrible, am I?’

  The boy shook his head again, staring down at the ground. ‘No . . .’

  Ashton looked up at the tree-tops, swaying gently in silhouette against the leaden sky. He closed his eyes, as relaxed as he could remember feeling since the debacle when Josh had come to stay; far more confident than he had been for several days that things would be all right. That the three of them could somehow make things work.

  That they could all enjoy themselves.

  He said, ‘Not long now until it’s properly dark, so we’ll hang on until that happens, OK? Then, it’ll be really exciting walking home, won’t it? Just the two of us in the pitch black, blind as moles, creeping along together in the darkness.’

  He took the boy’s head in his hands and turned it until the boy’s eyes met his own. Even then, he could tell that the boy was still thinking about what might be in the bushes. Still listening out for that scritch-scratch.

  ‘Then, if you’ve behaved yourself, and if you can manage to be nice to me, we’ll see about those chips.’

  SEVENTY-THREE

  While Angie continued to swear and spit curses, railing furiously – at the animal whose address was scribbled on the piece of paper folded beneath the handbrake, at all those like him, at the drivers of every car in their way – Cat sat in silence and kept her eyes fixed on the black strip of the Barnet bypass as it rolled towards her, the blur of white lines as they were sucked beneath the wheels of Angie’s ancient Honda Civic. She moved her feet, trying to find a patch of room among the assortment of empty cans and litter in the footwell. She sat on her hands to stop them shaking and thought about the man w
ho had taken her son.

  Cat had met him a couple of times, when she’d been at Maria’s and he’d dropped in for something or other. She remembered him nodding and grunting a hello while he looked at some spot on the wall behind her. She remembered thinking that he was more than slightly up himself, that he was a bit vacant. Maria had been very happy to put flesh on those bones, of course. She’d talked about her ex-husband all the time. She had plenty of stories.

  He was selfish and he was arrogant, like a lot of doctors, she said. He was socially inept, whatever that meant, and in their last few years together he’d become very . . . cold. Nobody’s idea of a perfect husband, not in a million years, but he was a good father.

  Maria had always taken pains to point that out.

  A loving father.

  The Civic’s engine complained as Angie asked more of it and Cat could feel the suspension juddering beneath her, clattering through her spine at every bump or crack in the road.

  Jeff Ashton had taken her son . . .

  It was all Cat knew with any certainty because she’d seen the look on Thorne’s face, the blood draining from it when he’d been handed that picture. She could not allow herself to think much beyond that simple fact. Instead she clung on to the belief that Kieron would have understood what was happening, would have figured it out straight away and tried to keep himself safe until she could get to him. Her conviction that, aside from the thousand and one other amazing things he was, Kieron was a clever boy.

  A clever boy, who would have done whatever was necessary to stay alive.

  She did not, could not dwell on what those things might have been, of course. There had been many times these last few weeks when it had been impossible to think of anything else; thoughts that had inevitably darkened and become unbearable, to the point where reaching for the window latch or the nearest kitchen knife had seemed like the only relief possible.

  Not now, though. Not when she was on her way to him, whatever that might mean.

  Him, or some trace of him.